Whitewashing Bismarck just won’t wash

The reviewer’s first duty is to declare any skin he may have in the game, so here goes: I write this in a bone-chillingly old house filled with portraits of Prussian Junkers, ancestors of my third son, the oldest of them still wearing steel plate about chest and shoulders, the more recent armoured only by expressions of ineffable superiority.

What a lot of them there are. Somehow their Lutheran Prussia — dirt poor by the standards of France and Britain but uniquely militarised, its spiritual heart so far east as to be now in Russia — managed, in the second half of the 19th century, to annex the entire human and industrial strength of wealthy, advanced, largely Catholic western Germany for their ancient ‘drive to the east’. The Eastern Front in the second world war, with all its attendant horrors, was merely their final throw; for the one thing which united this caste-bound bunch with the otherwise despised ‘Bohemian Corporal’ Hitler was their determination to sort out the Slav helots — as they saw them — once and for all.

Few stories can bear more retelling, and though it was matchlessly covered in Christopher Clarke’s Iron Kingdom in 2007, Katja Hoyer takes the tale by the scruff of the neck and gives it a good shake for the less demanding general reader.

Her thesis is bold and simple. It is also one fit for these days, when the great nations seem to be putting up the shutters again. There was an original sin at the heart of Bismarck’s empire. What enabled him to create it as he did was the ‘spirit of defensive nationalism’ which took hold of Germany in 1813-5. Born in the uprising against generations of French cultural hegemony and Napoleonic occupation, that spirit became inappropriate to the economic and military behemoth that was Prussia-Germany by 1914, and was fatally rammed home by defeat in 1918, which completed German unification, but in quite the wrong way.